First, thank
you for your participation in and following of the Institute of Management
Consultants USA blog. This is a valuable
tool for reaching the IMC membership and consultant community and going forward
I see this channel being critical in my communications related to IMC and its
future. Additionally, I invite you to
provide feedback - This is your organization, THE community of professional
consultants who are committed to the excellence and advancement of ethics for
the management consulting profession – and we can’t succeed without your ongoing support. I hope you will
continue to stay engaged through this media, as well as through the website and
other IMC emails.

I want to
take this opportunity to provide you an update on the organization, as the
Board has just wrapped up its annual strategic planning session. With the
economic conditions of the past several years and the impact these
conditions have had on both the membership and the organization on the top of our minds, we approached strategic
planning with one outcome in mind: creating more value for our members to
help them during these challenging times.
The meeting resulted in the development of six major initiatives (with multiple tasks under each initiative), which
are:

Member retention -- providing a richer, more demonstrable
value for our members

Member acquisition -- creating more
opportunities to attract new talent to our chapters and membership

Grow! -- elevating the conference
to one presenting the exemplary reputation of the profession

University -- leveraging our competencies
and ethics commitment through partnerships with top universities to educate
consultants of the future

Certification -- raising the visibility of
certification and continuing to build the reputation of the professional
standard for management consultants

Again,
all of these initiatives have one common theme -- creating more value for you. You will hear more detail about each of these
initiatives in the coming months.

I am confident that the organization can achieve these
initiatives with the support of our membership and I know this from looking
back at your commitment to the profession in the past. The origin of this
organization 44 years ago was a peer group of the large consultancies coming together to raise the level of
professionalism and ethics in the profession. Over the past few years, with
your input and work, we focused on offering new services, such as the
Marketplace directory and increasing the brand recognition of our certification
through the process of becoming accredited as an
ISO/IEC 17074 certifying body.

So, what
can you do to help? Please write to me
at david.norman@imcusa.org, providing your suggestions for
the advancement of the organization, and/or your interest in serving (for
example, at the Chapter-level, on a committee or a task force) to carry out
these initiatives. We are, after all, a
membership organization run by volunteers -- the more collaborative the effort
and energy, the better the results.

Comments on this post...

I am glad to see these "chairs"; certainly in an organization as large and old as ours there should be more. this needs more study thant the gfollowing comment...is there merit in a "chair" for each discipline?

IE: HR, Strategy, Organization Development; Business of Corporations; I could go on and on...the question is would we benefit by this. I serve on Mark'as Ethics group and just assembling via the Internet or phone is difficult. What I am aluding to is...strengthening our specialities and eventually giving them individual exposure (and recognition).